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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KonKilo who wrote (25380)	7/28/2006 7:52:22 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 540824

Killing and bombing works well against naked aggression from an enemy that shows itself and wears a uniform, but far less well against shadowy phantoms who strike and then melt into the neighborhood. Police work and highly focused intel is essential. Large organizations with serious infrastructure can still be bombed as can the states that harbor or support them. Smaller groups can be subject to raids and assassination. Police work and intel definitely are essential but they aren't the whole answer. There is no doubt that the PNAC crowd wanted an Iraq invasion for decades Decades is probably stretching it. 1991 (the end of the "Gulf War") to 2003 (Iraq invasion) is only 12 years. Also many supporters of the invasion probably didn't support it until after 9/11 or even until after moves toward the invasion started to take place. The problem that I and so many others have with our administration's rationale for invasion was the rank dishonesty of trying to tie it to the 911 attacks. That's really a whole separate conversation. I'll just keep my response short and say that while the Iraq invasion was presented as a response to the root causes of terror, and Saddam was (to an extent accurately) accused of ties to or support of terrorists, there was not any "Saddam was behind 9/11" campaign. W went from saying things like "dead or alive" to "I'm really not concerned with bin Laden" to disbanding the unit that was charged with tracking him. The first to are political statements in response to events, and have little to do with changes in the actual conduct of anti-Al Qaeda operations. The disbanding of the unit seems to be a tactical decision. It had not been effective, and the issue is Al Qaeda as a whole, not bin Laden. We want him captured, but that doesn't mean its a bad idea to task the resources that went in to that unit more broadly against Al Qaeda, which is what was done. Its not like they where all fired and no replacements where hired. To suggest that any of these things amount to "forgetting about bin Laden", is unsupported and unreasonable. Tim